The fifth instance (f. 334) connects with Aūd (Oudh) because royal troops abandoning the place L:knū were those who had been sent against Shaikh Bāyazīd in Aūd.
The remaining three instances (f. 376, f. 376b, f. 377b) appear to concern one place, to which Bīban and Bāyazīd were rumoured to intend going, which they captured and abandoned. As the table of variants shows, Kehr’s MS. reads Lakhnūr in all three places, the Ḥai. MS. once only, varying from itself as it does in Nos. 1 and 2.—A circumstance supporting Lakhnūr is that one of the messengers sent to Bābur with details of the capture was the son of Shāh Muḥ. Dīwāna whose record associates him rather with Badakhshān, and with Humāyūn and Saṃbhal [perhaps with Lakhnūr itself] than with Bābur’s own army.—Supplementing my notes on these three instances, much could be said in favour of reading Lakhnūr, about time and distance done by the messengers and by ‘Abdu’l-lah kitābdār, on his way to Saṃbhal and passing near Lakhnūr; much too about the various rumours and Bābur’s immediate counter-action. But to go into it fully would need lengthy treatment which the historical unimportance of the little problem appears not to demand.—Against taking the place to be Lakhnau there are the considerations (a) that Lakhnūr was the safer harbourage for the Rains and less near the westward march of the royal troops returning from the battle of the Goghrā; (b) that the fort of Lakhnau was the renowned old Machchi-bawan (cf. Gazetteer of the Province of Oude, 3 vols., 1877, ii, 366).—So far as I have been able to fit dates and transactions together, there seems no reason why the two Afghāns should not have gone to Lakhnūr, have crossed the Ganges near it, dropped down south [perhaps even intending to recross at Dalmau] with the intention of getting back to the Farmūlīs and Jalwānīs perhaps in Sārwār, perhaps elsewhere to Bāyazīd’s brother Ma‘rūf.
U.—THE INSCRIPTIONS ON BĀBUR’S MOSQUE IN AJODHYA (OUDH).
Thanks to the kind response made by the Deputy-Commissioner of Fyzābād to my husband’s enquiry about two inscriptions mentioned by several Gazetteers as still existing on “Bābur’s Mosque” in Oudh, I am able to quote copies of both.[2847]
a. The inscription inside the Mosque is as follows:—
1. Ba farmūda-i-Shāh Bābur ki ‘ādilash
Banā’īst tā kākh-i-gardūn mulāqī,
2. Banā kard īn muhbit̤-i-qudsiyān